Yesterday I accidentally stumbled over the successor of MPlayer and mplayer2. mpv Video Player that is. One has to be aware of the differences between the projects but all in all I was very impressed with how it handled some of the video files I threw at it. It includes most of the improvements that mplayer2 introduced over the old and somewhat bloated Mplayer code and even brings VDPAU and VAAPI directly compiled in. However I did not compile for myself but users this https://launchpad.net/~mc3man/+archive/mpv-tests/ repository instead. It even includes the correct icon für Ubuntu’s Unity and brings a .desktop file as well.

In order to optimize power consumption PowerTOP can be utilized in its recent version 2.0. Ubuntu 12.04 ships with 1.97 so if you want to benefit from the latest and greatest you’ll have to compile for yourself. However this is not a big deal.

After everything else works out of the box with a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04 I realized that brightness control via FN key doesn’t. The problem seems to be somewhere located in the Nvidia driver for GT330M and can easily be solved by adding one line to the “Device” section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Last week I posted about my connection problems with iwlwifi and network manager. For the duration of a week I have tested wicd as an alternative connection tool on two Intel machines and must say: no disconnections or any problems whatsoever so far! iwlwifi options can be set to N speed and no modifications other than stopping the LED from blinking are necessary.

Wireless is traditionally troublesome on Linux. The other day I transferred a lot of data over my wifi. After iwlwifi is finally stable for Intel devices using wicd, ath9k for Atheros wasn’t. It nearly passed out a couple of times leaving me with unusable connection speed.

I’m still testing if the culprit is hardware encryption or maybe power saving. For now I disabled hardware encryption with

Although the new Unity experience is a smooth and snappy one desktop wise, video playback is a little choppy and sluggish. Even when using GPU powered VDPAU compiz is using a lot more CPU than it should and playback all in all is not enjoyable for me. Unlike earlier releases tearing is not a problem though.

Installing Gnome Shell works much better for video. But the new 3.4 desktop feels not as good as 3.2 did. So not a real option either.

Fortunately there is xbmc with its great media center software. For the first time available from standard Ubuntu repositories. Using it from within either Unity or Gnome suffers from the underlying desktop environments. Choosing the xbmc session from lightdm however delivers what any media enthusiast would want. Playback is smooth, CPU is very low and I’m happy again.

I have one laptop running over night sometimes. That requires a stable wifi connection which I found out Ubuntu 12.04 with iwlwifi could not offer. Often I returned to the desktop in the morning and network-manager disconnected hours ago without establishing a new connection. So no down and uploads since then. Manually trying to reconnect doesn’t work either. One either has to switch off and on wifi or unload and reload the iwlwifi module.

I experimented with iwlwifi options 11n_disable and swcrypto as some people on the net suggested but no luck. Wifi kept disconnecting unpredictably. Then I stumbled upon one bug addressing this misbehavior to network-manager suggesting to remove it and install wicd. That was what I did last week and had not one disconnection since then!